Series

Yoshida x 3

August 3 to August 5

Yoshishige Yoshida, also known as Kiju Yoshida, is by any name one of the masters of the Japanese New Wave, combining a pioneer’s explorative drive with an incisive political mind to forge a body of work that dug deep into his nation’s complicated history in order to explain its troubled present. Nowhere is this more evident than in Yoshida’s trilogy of films chronicling a history of radical sects in Japan: The extraordinary Eros + Massacre, set in 1923, imagines the final days of feminist Noe Ito and anarchist Sakae Osugu; Heroic Purgatory seems to take place in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the mutual security pact between Japan and the United States, though boldly blurs time periods; Coup D’etat rides along on the failed 1936 uprising led by militarist Ikki Kita, later a hero of Yuki Mishima’s. Taken altogether, these films offer an X-ray view of the Japanese body politic—and an ultra-rare opportunity for a New York audience to catch up with one of the country’s greatest living filmmakers.